Website Redesign Project Plan Template: Six Phases in a Sheet, With Owners and Gates

Google's site-move documentation says redirects from old URLs should stay in place for generally at least a year, and that a medium-sized site can see rankings move for a few weeks or more after launch. Most redesign plans end on launch day. The plan below does not, because the phase after launch is where the traffic is kept or lost.

This page is a project plan you can copy into a spreadsheet: six phases, 24 tasks, one accountable owner per task and a gate that closes each phase. The thresholds in the gates come from Google, the W3C and WebAIM; the phase structure is ours, and we say where.

Why a redesign plan needs gates, not just dates

A redesign is a common project and an easy one to let drift. Databox found about 49% of small and mid-sized companies had fully redesigned within the past two years, and Orbit Media's tracking of 50 top marketing sites put their average lifespan at two years and one month. Most marketing teams will run one of these every few years, which is not often enough to have a process anyone remembers.

Dates alone do not stop a redesign slipping. A plan with dates and no gates lets design start before the page map is agreed, and lets launch happen before the redirects are tested. Each phase below ends with a gate: a yes-or-no question, the evidence that answers it, and the one person who says yes. Work on the next phase can start early. Sign-off on it cannot.

The model borrows from the UK Government Digital Service, which runs services through discovery, alpha, beta and live, with an explicit decision at the end of each. GOV.UK's service manual puts a typical discovery at 4 to 8 weeks and an alpha at 6 to 8. Those durations are for new public services, not marketing sites, and they are a useful warning: if your redesign's discovery is heading towards GOV.UK territory, it has become a different project.

The six phases at a glance

The sheet: 24 tasks with owners

Copy this table into a spreadsheet and add five columns to the right: Consulted, Informed, Start, Due and Status (Not started, In progress, Blocked, Done). Add an Evidence column with a link to the file that proves each gate task is done. The role names are generic; replace them with people. Responsible is the person doing the work; Accountable is the one person who signs it off. A task may have several people responsible but only one accountable, which is the rule Atlassian's RACI guide sets out.

Three rows are where most plans differ from this one. Task 1.02 exists because GA4's retention setting only covers explorations and funnel reports, and a property left on two months cannot give you the year-on-year funnel comparison you will want in phase six. Task 2.04 sits in phase two, before design, so that the page map is tested against the URLs you already rank for. Task 6.03 is the only gate after launch, and it is the one that tells you whether the redesign worked.

Phase two is where a redesign keeps its traffic

The Databox figure that 40.15% of companies delay a redesign over SEO concerns is a fair fear with a procedural answer. Google's site-move guidance lists what to do, and nearly all of it belongs in phase two rather than the week before launch.

Build the old URL list from four places. Google suggests sitemaps, Search Console's links report, server logs and analytics, and says to prioritise the pages with the most traffic and links. Images, PDFs and other files with links pointing at them move too.

Use the inventory to decide, not just to list. Nielsen Norman Group defines an inventory as the list of what exists and an audit as the judgement on it: each item rated high, mediocre or low, then marked keep, update or remove, with an owner for every update. That status column drives the redirect sheet. Kept pages map one to one. Removed pages either redirect to the closest equivalent or return a 404 or 410.

Do not send everything to the homepage. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to one unrelated page can be treated as a soft 404. Merged content can redirect to the merged page.

Keep chains short. Google asks for redirects straight to the final URL, and where that is not possible, chains of ideally no more than three hops and fewer than five. A site on its second or third redesign usually has chains already; phase two is where they get flattened.

Know your platform's import rules. On Webflow, a CSV import of 301 redirects overwrites every existing redirect on the site, the file can be up to 16MB, and the redirects only take effect after the site is published. Export the current list first, merge it, then import. We build marketing sites in Webflow, so this is the platform we know best; other platforms have their own versions of the same trap.

The page map itself is covered in B2B Website Strategy: How to Write the Page Map Before Anyone Opens Figma. This plan only needs it signed before phase three starts.

The launch gate: thresholds you can check

Phase five is the gate that most needs numbers, because "it looks fine" is not a test. These are the checks we would put in the QA record, each with a pass mark from the body that sets it.

The Core Web Vitals thresholds are field measures, so a staging site can only be tested in the lab. Treat lab results as a warning light before launch and confirm the field numbers in phase six.

The accessibility rows are there because the failures are common and cheap to fix before launch. WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top million home pages found low-contrast text on 83.9% of them, missing image alt text on 53.1%, missing form labels on 51%, empty links on 46.3%, empty buttons on 30.6% and no document language on 13.5%. A redesign that ships any of those has added a known defect to a brand-new site.

On permanent versus temporary redirects, Google's documentation is clear that 301 and 308 redirects pass the canonical signal to the target, while 302 and 307 leave the old URL eligible to stay in results. A redesign is permanent, so its redirects should be too.

How long each phase takes

Durations depend on page count, content and how fast decisions come back. Our marketing-site process runs all six phases in four weeks, and our published account of it says the usual four-month slip is about two weeks of building and fourteen weeks of waiting for decisions.

The schedule holds on two conditions: copy exists or is written alongside the page map, and each review is a 30-minute call with the two approvers rather than days of comment threads. On the USLege redesign, the first version shipped in under a month and replaced a four-page site; the site later grew past 500 pages, which is the argument for settling CMS fields in phase two rather than adding them later. Our white-label builds for Web Tonic run two to three weeks per site.

When we would plan longer: a migration of several hundred URLs, content that has to be written from scratch, or a sign-off chain longer than two people. In each case we would lengthen phases two and four, not the gates. We quote each redesign per project once the page count and the content plan are known.

Running phase six without guessing

Phase six starts on launch day and ends with task 6.03, the 30-day comparison. Google's site-move guidance names the reports to watch: the sitemap report for the new URLs being picked up, page indexing for errors and the old URLs dropping out, and the performance report for new URLs gaining impressions. It also says to expect temporary ranking fluctuation, and that a medium site often takes a few weeks or more to settle.

That is why the comparison is at 30 days and not three. Our own process launches early in the week so the first three working days catch broken forms and tracking; the ranking comparison waits for the 30-day mark. The handover documents for the client team are a separate deliverable, covered in The Webflow Client Handover Kit, and the tracking set-up behind tasks 1.02 and 4.04 is laid out in The Analytics Stack for a Four-Week Site Build.

How to use this plan

Copy the task sheet, put a real name in every Accountable cell before the project starts, and refuse to start phase three until tasks 2.03 and 2.04 are signed. If a phase cannot name its accountable person, that is the first risk on the project. Use the launch thresholds as the definition of done for phase five, and book the 30-day review in the calendar on the day you launch. For the cost and frequency data behind a redesign decision, Website Redesign Statistics 2026 has the survey numbers. Our website redesign service page explains how we run these six phases and scope each project.